In Deep Water: Battleborn Introduces Alani

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Gearbox’s hero-centric shooter/MOBA/co-op project, Battleborn [official site], has given a proper look at the first of its five additional heroes – Alani, the water-bending warrior monk. Alice mentioned her a while back but there’s now a run-down of her abilities if you’re interested in playing as her.

The official release is on 31 May but if you picked up a season pass or the digital deluxe version of the game you can unlock her early with a hero key. (Also if you played in the PS4 open beta of the game but I don’t know if we’re allowed to mention that on a PC gaming site without alarms sounding and the walls starting to crumble.)

Here’s her intro video:

“Alani is the last vestige of an Eldrid monastic warrior enclave on the freshwater ocean planet, Akopos. Raised with a deep reverence for water, Alani learned to embody and manipulate low-viscosity fluids with the use – er – rather, the warranty-breaking misuse of a water-soluble nanotech. This technology and her training allows her to manipulate water all around and even within her own body, healing injury and ailments.”

Looking at her skills, she has:

Torrent which chucks out bolts of water – I think this is her basic attack

Wellspring which coats an ally in healing water

Riptide which is a wave to damage enemies and give movement speed to allies

Geyser which is a ground targetted ability causing a gush of water that binds enemies it hits

Emergence (her ultimate ability) which summons a water dragon to damage foes. The actual animation looks like a whirlpool with a dragon that shoots out of the centre

Before they sign off on the blog entry for Alani, Gearbox also tease the second of the five new characters. He’s a snake assassin called Pendles who wears a hoodie and sneakers. I assume they’re teasing him early because you can unlock him without the season pass stuff if you’ve earned 47,500 in-game credits so this is to give people a heads-up that they’ll need to either pick up a season pass to bypass that time requirement or invest the time.

Are we going to see a new post for every character in every wide-range-of-characters-based game? I mean no offense and I love some of these games, but it doesn’t really fit the spirit of this website does it? In addition, for each of these games, either you follow it closely or you don’t care. In both cases news about a new character is of little value to you, because you either know it already or just don’t care. But I guess I am wrong, since you wouldn’t write this stuff, if it weren’t for some crispy clicks.

I don’t follow battleborn, or have any interest in it ( Overwatch is taking up my time ) but I still found it pretty cool. To the extent of seeing the post on the home page, being interested enough to click it, read it and watch the video.

Having no interest in playing isn’t necessarily equated with having no interest in seeing the ideas, art style and characters in the game.

Well, I don’t follow the game, but it’s interesting to see the abilities and if I don’t want to at some point, it’s very easy to scroll past the post.

For what it’s worth, they collapsed their “Overwatch characters guide” into a single post on the front page, with the character-specific posts reachable through links, which was a nice approach, I think.

I mean that’s the stuff I’d go to IGN for. Can anyone give an argument why these articles are not advertorials? Moreover, it’s somewhat arbitrary. I mean each of these games starts with 20+ Characters, none of which gets an article on its own.

Then again, if people like this stuff, I guess I can just scroll over it.

My problem is that these days, I’m doing more and more scrolling past and finding less and less of interest on RPS. If you remove all the MOBA character announcements, e-sport tournament soap-opera posts and ban scandals and all the Kickstarter project announcements or hype, what’s actually left?

Problem is, I still don’t know any other site that actually covers PC gaming in any sort of decent way. If I did, I bet I wouldn’t be here any more.

It’s not advertorial because we’re not paid to post these. Undisclosed advertorial would be illegal, so thanks for the accusation?

You don’t like them. That’s fine. Evidently others do, as they have explained to you. You seem to already know the solution to this problem. Not everyone will enjoy every post, but we try to make them interesting and accessible to more than just a game’s existing players.

I still think it’s way too light on content. Like RPS had a lobotomy in the last couple of months… dark souls bosses, moba characters, all the episodic games’ episodes, I think we even had a press-kit site coverage with the new Mirror’s edge map-thingy. Maybe less would be more… or maybe I’m just getting old. Dunno.

“Is this really the kind of content the site needs” is becoming a more common question so let me put in my 2 pence. In the current gaming/journalism/newssite/hints’n’tips climate the answer is probably yes.

Quite a few of my friends write in different areas of the industry. Some write guides, some news,some reviews and some opinion pieces. The numbers that sites do on the very basic information that many people take for granted is mind boggling. A buddy of mine will write an article a day for the site he works for that will, within the first 30 days of being online, generate millions of hits and after that will have a very long tail of engagement. One thing the site has noticed is that it’s news and review section is becoming more and more relevant as people arrive there for the simple tips and see the other stuff.

I doubt anyone from RPS will say so, and I may be off on this, but I would expect to see more of this type of thing, more guides to heroes and abilities in the bigger games etc because that is how the model is changing. It’s not always about trying to get new readers and sometimes its just about needing to react to how the market is changing.

I’m aware that readers like to take a degree of ownership of a site but they often fail to comprehend that their engagement and readership isn’t enough to keep a site going. It’s the endless parade of people who read but never speak that will provide the vast majority of a sites income.

All that said, if you value RPS and the type of content that ends up here from the writers that work here it’s time to admit that in a changing market they will also need to change the type of content that can end up here and just scroll over what we ourselves don’t find all that interesting.